Two links to Marco Arment within a few days? Well, if you make good points: "Many Windows developers were upset that iOS development had to be done on a Mac, but it didn't hurt Apple: the most important developers for iOS apps were already using Macs. But the success of Windows 8 and Windows Phone in the consumer space requires many of those consumer-product developers, now entrenched in the Apple ecosystem, to care so much about Windows development that they want to use Windows to develop for it. How likely is that?" As usual a bit too Apple-centric (he implies - as explicit as possible while still being implicit - that only iOS developers can create great applications), but his point still stands. Judging by the abysmal quality of Microsoft's own Metro applications (Mail, Video, Music, People, IE10, etc.), even Microsoft doesn't know how to create great Metro applications.

- lock-in on OS pc shipments;
- Commercial ties with hardware companies - still strong;
- business applications that leverage the value of MS as a business platform, which is still great. Apple is far away on this;
- games - still unsurpassed. Consoles did shift a little the market but it is still basically a MS camp. Most games are still developed on MS platform;
- market opportunity for new professionals - undermined by surge on opportunities of the move to the web. It is actually almost platform agnostic now;
- regular software - also undermined by the surge of users not needing special applications other than what is web or multimedia related. i.e., they need basically browsers as a platform for their needs plus something to take care of photos, music and movies. This is the weakest point of MS as they dont have a good enough solution to counter iTunes (by the way, which a consider a monstrosity, but I am not the typical user anyway).

The shift to the web is the critical part for MS, as it devalued its before untouchable position as well as the huge number of people that just care about using computers/tablets/phones for communication and shopping purposes.

So, what MS can do? Use what they have strong to break in and improve their solution to take care of photos, music and videos. Make no mistakes, even thought Ballmer was/is not the right guy to lead MS, they will probably succeed. My guess is that BlackBerry is in a bad position right now.

Even if slowly in the beginning and, of course, not with the same drive that they had before, they will start to capture back market share. Sad, but true.